Faith in the
future:
Islam after the Enlightenment

First Annual
Altaf Gauhar Memorial LectureIslamabad,
23 December 2002

Your
excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, may I express my warm gratitude
to you all for paying me the compliment of attending today? It is particularly
gratifying to me to attend an event in this country, the only state established
in recent history specifically as a homeland for Muslims. It is also a
privilege to be associated with the name of the late and revered Altaf
Gauhar, whose translations from the Qur’an certainly formed, back in the
late 1970s, part of my own personal journey towards Islam

I want to
talk about religion - our religion - and address the question of what
exactly is going on when we speak about the prospects of a mutually helpful
engagement between Islam and Western modernity. I propose to tackle this
rather large question by invoking what I take to be the underlying issue
in all religious talk, which is its ability both to propose and to resolve
paradoxes.

We might
begin by saying that theology is the most ambitious and fruitful of disciplines
because it is all about the successful squaring of circles. Most obviously,
it seeks to capture, in the limited net of human language, something of
the mystery of an infinite God. Most taxingly, it seeks to demonstrate
that an omnipotent God is also absolutely just, and that an apparently
infinite reward or chastisement can attend upon finite human behaviour.
Most scandalously, it holds that we are more than natural philosophy can
describe or know, and that we can achieve states of being in what we call
the soul that are as movingly palpable as they are inexplicable. The Spirit,
as the scriptures tell us, ‘is of the command of our Lord, and of knowledge
you have been given but little.’ (17:85)

So we have
a list of imponderables. But to this list the specifically Islamic form
of monotheism adds several additional items. The first of these items
is what we call universalism, that is to say, that Islam does not limit
itself to the upliftment of any given section of humanity, but rather
announces a desire to transform the entire human family. This is,
if you like, its Ishmaelite uniqueness: the religions that spring from
Isaac (a.s.), are, in our understanding, an extension of Hebrew
and Occidental particularity, while Islam is universal. Hagar, unlike
Sarah, is half-Egyptian, half-Gentile, and it is she who goes forth into
the Gentile world. Rembrandt’s famous picture of the expulsion of Hagar
and Ishmael has Sarah mockingly peering out of a window. She is old, and
stays at home; while Hagar is young, and looks, with her son, towards
limitless horizons.

In the hadith,
we learn that ‘Every prophet was sent to his own people; but I am sent
to all mankind’ (bu‘ithtu li’l-nasi kaffa). [1] This will demand
the squaring of a circle - in fact of many circles - in a way that is
characteristically Islamic. Despite its Arabian origins, Islam is to be
not merely for the nations, but of the nations. No pre-modern
civilisation embraced more cultures than that of Islam - in fact, it was
Muslims who invented globalisation. The many-coloured fabric of the traditional
Umma is not merely part of the glory of the Blessed Prophet, of
whom it is said: ‘Truly your adversary is the one cut off’. (108:3) It
also demonstrates the divine purpose that this Ishmaelite covenant is
to bring a monotheism that uplifts, rather than devastates cultures. Islam
brought immense fertility to the Indian subcontinent, upgrading architecture,
cuisine, music, and languages. Nothing could be more unfair than the Indian
chauvinistic thesis, given its most articulate and insidious voice by
V.S. Naipaul, that Islam is a travelling parochialism, an ‘Arab imperialism’.
[2]

That, then,
has been another circle successfully squared - the bringing to the very
different genius of the Subcontinent an uncompromising monotheism which
fertilised, and brought to the region its highest artistic and literary
moments. Mother India was never more fecund than when she welcomed the
virility of Islam. Remember the words of Allama Iqbal:

Behold
and see! In Ind’s domain

Thou shalt
not find the like again,

That,
though a Brahman’s son I be,

Tabriz
and Rum stand wide to me. [3]

It is our
confidence, moreover, that this triumphant demonstration of Islam’s universalism
has not come to an end. Perhaps the greatest single issue exercising the
world today is the following: is the engagement of Islamic monotheism
with the new capitalist global reality a challenge that even Islam, with
its proven ability to square circles, cannot manage?

As Muslims,
of course, we believe that every culture, including the culture of modern
consumer liberalism, stands accountable before the claims of revelation.
There must, therefore, be a mode of behaviour that modernity can adopt
that can be meaningfully termed Islamic, without entailing its transformation
into a monochrome Arabness. This is a consequence of our universalist
assumptions, but it is also an extension of our triumphalism, and our
belief that the divine purposes can be read in history. Wa-kalimatu’Llahi
hiya’l-‘ulya - God’s word is uppermost. (9:40) The current agreement
between zealots on both sides - Islamic and unbelieving - that Islam and
Western modernity can have no conversation, and cannot inhabit each other,
seems difficult given traditional Islamic assurances about the universal
potential of revelation. The increasing number of individuals who identify
themselves as entirely Western, and entirely Muslim, demonstrate that
the arguments against the continued ability of Islam to be inclusively
universal are simply false.

Yet the question,
the big new Eastern Question, will not go away this easily. Palpably,
there are millions of Muslims who are at ease somewhere within the spectrum
of the diverse possibilities of Westernness. We need, however, a theory
to match this practice. Is the accommodation real? What is the theological
or fiqh status of this claim to an overlap? Can Islam really square
this biggest of all historical circles, or must it now fail, and retreat
into impoverished and hostile marginality, as history passes it by?

Let us refine
this question by asking what, exactly, is the case against Islam’s contemporary
claim to universal relevance? Some of the most frank arguments have come
from right-wing European politicians, as part of their campaign to reduce
Muslim immigration to Europe. This has, of course, become a prime political
issue in the European Union, a local extension of a currently global argument.

Sometimes
one hears the claim that Muslims cannot inhabit the West, or - as successful
participants - the Western-dominated global reality, because Islam has
not passed through a reformation. This is a tiresome and absent-minded
claim that I have heard from senior diplomats who simply cannot be troubled
to read their own history, let alone the history of Islam. A reformation,
that is to say, a bypass operation which avoids the clogged arteries of
medieval history and seeks to refresh us with the lifeblood of the scriptures
themselves, is precisely what is today underway among those movements
and in those places which the West finds most intimidating. The Islamic
world is now in the throes of its own reformation, and our Calvins and
Cromwells are proving no more tolerant and flexible than their European
predecessors. [4]

A reformation,
then, is a bad thing to ask us for, if you would like us to be more pliant.
But there is an apparently more intelligible demand, which is that we
must pass through an Enlightenment. Take, for instance, the late Dutch
politician Pim Fortuyn. In his book Against the Islamisation of our
Culture, he writes: ‘Christianity and Judaism have gone through the
laundromat of humanism and enlightenment, but that is not the case with
Islam.’ [5]

Fortuyn is
not a marginal voice. His funeral at Rotterdam Cathedral, reverently covered
by Dutch television, attracted a vast crowd of mourners. As his coffin
passed down the city’s main street, the Coolsingel, so many flowers were
thrown that the vehicle itself almost disappeared from sight, recalling,
to many, the scenes attending the funeral of Princess Diana. The election
performance of his party a week later was a posthumous triumph, as his
associate Hilbrand Nawijn was appointed minister for asylum and immigration.
Fortuyn’s desire to close all Holland’s mosques was not put into effect,
but a number of new, highly-restrictive, policies have been implemented.
Asylum seekers now have to pay a seven thousand Euro deposit for compulsory
Dutch language and citizenship lessons. A 90 percent cut in the budget
of asylum seeker centres has been approved. An official government enquiry
into the Dutch Muslim community was ordered by the new parliament in July
2002. [6]

I take the
case of the Netherlands because it was, until very recently, a model of
liberalism and multiculturalism. Indeed, modern conceptions of religious
toleration may be said to have originated among Dutch intellectuals. Without
wishing to sound the alarm, it is evident that if Holland can adopt an
implicitly inquisitorial attitude to Islam, there is no reason why other
states should not do likewise.

But again,
the question has not been answered. Fortuyn, a highly-educated and liberal
Islamophobe, was convinced that Islam cannot square the circle. He would
say that the past genius of Islam in adapting itself to cultures from
Senegal to Sumatra cannot be extended into our era, because the rules
of that game no longer apply. Success today demands membership of a global
reality, which means signing up to the terms of its philosophy. The alternative
is poverty, failure, and - just possibly - the B52s.

How should
Islam answer this charge? The answer is, of course, that ‘Islam’ can’t.
The religion’s strength stems in large degree from its internal diversity.
Different readings of the scriptures attract different species of humanity.
There will be no unified Islamic voice answering Fortuyn’s interrogation.
The more useful question is: who should answer the charge? What
sort of Muslim is best equipped to speak for us, and to defeat his logic?

Fortuyn’s
error was to impose a Christian squint on Islam. As a practising Catholic,
he imported assumptions about the nature of religious authority that ignore
the multi-centred reality of Islam. On doctrine, we try to be united -
but he is not interested in our doctrine. On fiqh, we are substantially
diverse. Even in the medieval period, one of the great moral and methodological
triumphs of the Muslim mind was the confidence that a variety of madhhabs
could conflict formally, but could all be acceptable to God. In fact,
we could propose as the key distinction between a great religion and a
sect the ability of the former to accommodate and respect substantial
diversity. Fortuyn, and other European politicians, seek to build a new
Iron Curtain between Islam and Christendom, on the assumption that Islam
is an ideology functionally akin to communism, or to the traditional churches
of Europe.

The great
tragedy is that some of our brethren would agree with him. There are many
Muslims who are happy to describe Islam as an ideology. One suspects that
they have not troubled to look the term up, and locate its totalitarian
and positivistic undercurrents. It is impossible to deny that certain
formulations of Islam in the twentieth century resembled European ideologies,
with their obsession with the latest certainties of science, their regimented
cellular structure, their utopianism, and their implicit but primary self-definition
as advocates of communalism rather than of metaphysical responsibility.
The emergence of ‘ideological Islam’ was, particularly in the mid-twentieth
century, entirely predictable. Everything at that time was ideology. Spirituality
seemed to have ended, and postmodernism was not yet a twinkle in a Parisian
eye. In fact, the British historian John Gray goes so far as to describe
the process which Washington describes as the ‘war on terror’ as an internal
Western argument which has nothing to do with traditional Islam. As he
puts it: ‘The ideologues of political Islam are western voices, no less
than Marx or Hayek. The struggle with radical Islam is yet another western
family quarrel.’ [7]

There are,
of course, significant oversimplications in this analysis. There are some
individuals in the new movements who do have a substantial grounding in
Islamic studies. And the juxtaposition of ‘political’ and ‘Islam’ will
always be redundant, given that the Islamic, Ishmaelite message is inherently
liberative, and hence militantly opposed to oppression.

Nonetheless,
the irony remains. We are represented by the unrepresentative, and the
West sees in us a mirror image of its less attractive potentialities.
Western Muslim theologians such as myself frequently point out that the
movements which seek to represent Islam globally, or in Western minority
situations, are typically movements which arose as reactions against Western
political hegemony that themselves internalised substantial aspects of
Western political method. In Europe, Muslim community leaders who are
called upon to justify Islam in the face of recent terrorist activities
are ironically often individuals who subscribe to ideologised forms of
Islam which adopt dimensions of Western modernity in order to secure an
anti-Western profile. It is no surprise that such leaders arouse the suspicion
of the likes of Pim Fortuyn, or, indeed, a remarkably wide spectrum of
commentators across the political spectrum.

Islam’s universalism,
however, is not well-represented by the advocates of movement Islam. Islamic
universalism is represented by the great bulk of ordinary mosque-going
Muslims who around the world live out different degrees of accommodation
with the local and global reality. One could argue, against Fortuyn, that
Muslim communities are far more open to the West than vice-versa, and
know far more about it. Muslims return from the mosques in Cairo in time
for the latest American soaps. There is no equivalent desire in the West
to learn from and integrate into other cultures. On the ground, the West
is keener to export than to import, to shape, rather than be shaped. As
such, its universalism can seem imperial and hierarchical, driven by corporations
and strategic imperatives that owe nothing whatsoever to non-Western cultures,
and acknowledge their existence only where they might turn out to be obstacles.
Likewise, Westerners, when they settle outside their cultural area, almost
never assimilate to the culture which newly surrounds them. Islam, we
will therefore insist, is more flexible than the West. Where they are
intelligently applied, our laws and customs, mediated through the due
instruments of ijtihad, have been reshaped substantially by encounter
with the Western juggernaut, through faculties such as the concern for
public interest, or urf - customary legislation. Western law and
society, by contrast, have not admitted significant emendation at the
hands of another culture for many centuries.

From our
perspective, then, it can seem that it is the West, not the Islamic world,
which stands in need of reform in a more pluralistic direction. It claims
to be open, while we are closed, but in reality, on the ground, seems
closed, while we have been open.

*
* *

I think there
is force to this defence. But does it help us answer the insistent question
of Mr Fortuyn? Do we have to pass through his laundromat to be made internally
white, as it were, to have an authentic and honoured place of belonging
at the table of the modern reality?

Historians
would probably argue that since history cannot repeat itself, the demand
that Islam experience an Enlightenment is strange, and that if the task
be attempted, it cannot remotely guarantee an outcome analogous to that
experienced by Europe. If honest and erudite enough, they may also recognise
that the Enlightenment possibilities in Europe were themselves the consequence
of a Renaissance humanism which was triggered not by an internal European
or Christian logic, but by the encounter with Islamic thought, and particularly
the Islamised version of Aristotle which, via Ibn Rushd, took fourteenth-century
Italy by storm. The stress on the individual, the reluctance to establish
clerical hierarchies which hold sway over earthly kingdoms, the generalised
dislike of superstition, the slowness to persecute for the sake of credal
difference: all these may well be European transformations that were eased,
or even enabled, by the transfusion of a certain kind of Muslim wisdom
from Spain.

Nonetheless,
it is clear that the Christian and Jewish Enlightenments of the eighteenth
century did not move Europe in a religious, still less an Islamic direction.
Instead, they moved outside the Moorish paradigm to produce a disenchantment,
a desacralising of the world which opened the gates for two enormous transformations
in human experience. One of these has been the subjugation of nature to
the will (or more usually the lower desires) of man. The consequences
for the environment, and even for the sustainable habitability of our
planet, are looking increasingly disturbing. There is certainly an oddness
about the Western desire to convert the Third World to a high-consumption
market economy, when it is certain that if the world were to reach American
levels of fossil-fuel consumption, global warming would soon render the
planet entirely uninhabitable.

The second
dangerous consequence of ‘Enlightenment’, as Muslims see it, is the replacement
of religious autocracy and sacred kingship with either a totalitarian
political order, or with a democratic liberal arrangement that has no
fail-safe resistance to moving in a totalitarian direction. Take, for
instance, the American Jewish philosopher Peter Ochs, for whom the Enlightenment
did away with Jewish faith in God, while the Holocaust did away with Jewish
faith in humanity. As he writes:

They lost
faith in a utopian humanism that promised: ‘Give up your superstitions!
Abandon the ethnic and religious traditions that separate us one from
the other! Subject all aspects of life to rational scrutiny and the disciplines
of science! This is how we will be saved.’ It didn’t work. Not that science
and rationality are unworthy; what failed was the effort to abstract these
from their setting in the ethics and wisdoms of received tradition. [8]

Here is another
voice from deep in the American Jewish intellectual tradition that many
in the Muslim world assume provides the staunchest advocates of the Enlightenment.
This time it is Irving Greenberg:

The humanistic
revolt for the ‘liberation’ of humankind from centuries of dependence
upon God and nature has been shown to sustain a capacity for demonic evil.
Twentieth-century European civilization, in part the product of the Enlightenment
and liberal culture, was a Frankenstein that authored the German monster’s
being. […] Moreover, the Holocaust and the failure to confront it make
a repetition more likely - a limit was broken, a control or awe is gone
- and the murder procedure is now better laid out and understood. [9]

The West
is loath to refer to this possibility in its makeup, as it urges, in Messianic
fashion, its pattern of life upon the world. It believes that Srebrenica,
or Mr Fortuyn, are aberrations, not a recurrent possibility. Muslims,
however, surely have the right to express deep unease about the demand
to submit to an Enlightenment project that seems to have produced so much
darkness as well as light. Iqbal, identifying himself with the character
Zinda-Rud in his Javid-name, declaims, to consummate the final
moment of his own version of the Mi‘raj: Inghelab-i Rus u Alman dide
am: ‘I have seen the revolutions of Russia and of Germany!’ [10] This
in a great, final crying-out to God.

We European
Muslims, born already amid the ambiguities of the Enlightenment, have
also wrestled with this legacy. Alija Izetbegovic, the former Bosnian
president, has discussed the relationship in his book Between East
and West. A lesser-known voice has been that of the Swedish theologian
Tage Lindbom, who died three years ago. Lindbom is particularly important
to European Muslim thought because of his own personal journey. A founder
member of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, and one of the major theorists
of the Swedish welfare state, Lindbom experienced an almost Ghazalian
crisis of doubt, and repented of his Enlightenment ideology in favour
of a kind of Islamic traditionalism. In 1962 he published his book The
Windmills of Sancho Panza, which generated enough of a scandal to
force him from his job, and he composed the remainder of his twenty-odd
books in retirement. For Lindbom, the liberation promised by the Enlightenment
did not only lead to the explicit totalitarianisms which ruined most of
Europe for much of the twentieth century, but also to an implicit, hidden
totalitarianism, which is hardly less dangerous to human freedom. We are
now increasingly slaves to the self, via the market, and the endlessly
proliferating desires and lifestyles which we take to be the result of
our free choice are in fact designed for us by corporation executives
and media moguls.

There can
be no brotherhood among human beings, Lindbom insists, unless there is
a God under whom we may be brothers. As he writes: ‘The perennial question
is always whether we humans are to understand our presence on this earth
as a vice-regency or trusteeship under the mandate of Heaven, or whether
we must strive to emancipate ourselves from any higher dominion, with
human supremacy as our ultimate aim.’ [11]

He goes on
as follows:

Secularization
increasingly becomes identified with two motives: the reduction of human
intelligence to rationalism, and sensual desire; the one is grafted onto
the vertebral nervous system, and the other is a function of the involuntary
and subconscious elements of man’s composite nature. Rationalism and sensualism
will prove to be the mental currents and the two forms of consciousness
whereby secularization floods the Western world. Human pride, superbia,
the first and greatest of the seven deadly sins, grows unceasingly; and
it is during the eighteenth century that man begins to formulate the notion
that he is discovering himself as the earthly agent of power. [12]

Lindbom’s
works have provoked sharp discussion among Western Muslims in the universities.
Enlightenment leads to sensualism and to rationality. Walter Benjamin
has already seen that it cannot guarantee that these principles will secure
a moral consensus, or protect the weak. It also - and here Lindbom has
less to say - yields its own destruction. Western intellectuals now speak
of post-modernism as an end of Enlightenment reason. Hence the new Muslim
question becomes: why jump into the laundromat if European thinkers have
themselves turned it off? Is the Third World to be brought to heel by
importing only Europe’s yesterdays? [13]

These are
troubled waters, and perhaps will carry us too far from our purpose in
this lecture. Let me, however, offer a few reflections on what our prospects
might look like if we excuse ourselves the duty of spinning in Mr Fortuyn’s
machine.

Islam, as
I rather conventionally observed a few minutes ago, speaks with many voices.
Fortuyn, and the new groundswell of educated Western Islamophobia, have
heard only a few of them, hearkening as they do to the totalitarian and
the extreme. Iqbal, I would suggest, and Altaf Gauhar, represent a very
different tradition. It is a tradition which insists that Islam is only
itself when it recognises that authenticity arises from recognising the
versatility of classical Islam, rather than taking any single reading
of the scriptures as uniquely true. Ijtihad, after all, is scarcely
a modern invention.

Iqbal puts
it this way:

The ultimate
spiritual basis of all life, as conceived by Islam, is eternal and reveals
itself in variety and change. A society based on such a conception of
Reality must reconcile in its life the categories of permanence and change.
[14]

In other
words, to use my own idiom, it must square the circle to be dynamic. The
immutable Law, to be alive, even to be itself, must engage with the mill-wheel
of the transient.

One of Altaf
Gauhar’s intellectual associates, Allahbakhsh Brohi, used the following
metaphor:

We need a
bi-focal vision: we must have an eye on the eternal principles sanctioned
by the Qur’anic view of man’s place in the scheme of things, and also
have the eye firmly fixed on the ever-changing concourse of economic-political
situation which confronts man from time to time. [15]

We do indeed
need a bi-focal ability. It is, after all, a quality of the Antichrist
that he sees with only one eye. An age of decadence, whether or not framed
by an Enlightenment, is an age of extremes, and the twentieth century
was, in Eric Hobsbawm’s phrase, precisely that. Islam has been Westernised
enough, it sometimes appears, to have joined that logic. We are either
neutralised by a supposedly benign Islamic liberalism that in practice
allows nothing distinctively Islamic to leave the home or the mosque -
an Enlightenment-style privatisation of religion that abandons the world
to the morality of the market leaders and the demagogues. Or we fall back
into the sensual embrace of extremism, justifying our refusal to deal
with the real world by dismissing it as absolute evil, as kufr,
unworthy of serious attention, which will disappear if we curse it enough.

Traditional
Islam, as is scripturally evident, cannot sanction either policy. Extremism,
however, has been probably the more damaging of the two. Al-Bukhari and
Muslim both narrate from A’isha, (r.a.), the hadith that runs:
‘Allah loves kindness is all matters.’ Imam Muslim also narrates from
Ibn Mas‘ud, (r.a.), that the Prophet (salla’Llahu ‘alayhi wa-sallam)
said: ‘Extremists shall perish’ (halaka’l-mutanatti‘un). Commenting
on this, Imam al-Nawawi defines extremists as ‘fanatical zealots’ (al-muta‘ammiqun
al-ghalun), who are simply ‘too intense’ (al-mushaddidun).

Revelation,
as always, requires the middle way. Extremism, in any case, never succeeds
even on its own terms. It usually repels more people from religion than
it holds within it. Attempts to reject all of global modernity simply
cannot succeed, and have not succeeded anywhere. A more sane policy, albeit
a more courageous, complex and nuanced one, has to be the introduction
of Islam as a prophetic, dissenting witness within the reality
of the modern world.

It should
not be hard to see where we naturally fit. The gaping hole in the Enlightenment,
pointed out by the postmodern theologians and by more sceptical but still
anxious minds, was the Enlightenment’s inability to form a stable and
persuasive ground for virtue and hence for what it has called ‘citizenship’.
David Hume expressed the problem as follows:

If the reason
be asked of that obedience which we are bound to pay to government, I
readily answer: Because society could not otherwise subsist; and
this answer is clear and intelligible to all mankind. Your answer is,
Because we should keep our word. But besides that, nobody, till
trained in a philosophical system, can either comprehend or relish this
answer; besides this, say, you find yourself embarrassed when it is asked,
Why we are bound to keep our word? Nor can you give any answer
but what would immediately, without any circuit, have accounted for our
obligation to allegiance. [16]

But why are
we bound to keep our word? Why need we respect the moral law? Religion
seems to answer this far more convincingly than any secular ethic. In
spite of all stereotypes, the degree of violence in the Muslim world remains
far less than that of Western lands governed by the hope of a persuasive
secular social contract. [17] Perhaps this is inevitable: the Enlightenment
was, after all, nothing but the end of the Delphic principle that to know
the world we must know and refine and uplift ourselves. Before Descartes,
Locke and Hume, all the world had taken spirituality to be the precondition
of philosophical knowing. Without love, self-discipline, and care for
others, that is to say, without a transformation of the human subject,
there could be no knowledge at all. The Enlightenment, however, as Descartes
foresaw, would propose that the mind is already self-sufficient and that
moral and spiritual growth are not preconditions for intellectual eminence,
so that they might function to shape the nature of its influence upon
society. Not only is the precondition of the transformation of the subject
repudiated, but the classical idea, shared by the religions and the Greeks,
that access to truth itself brings about a personal transformation, is
dethroned just as insistently. [18] Relationality is disposable, and the
laundromat turns out to be a centrifuge.

Religion
offers a solution to this fatal weakness. Applied with wisdom, it provides
a fully adequate reason for virtue and an ability to produce cultural
and political leaders who embody it themselves. Of course, it is all too
often applied improperly, and there is something of the Promethean arrogance
and hubris of the philosophes in the radical insistence that the
human subject be enthroned in authority over scriptural interpretation,
without a due prelude of initiation, love, and self-naughting. Yet the
failure of the Enlightenment paradigm, as invoked by the secular elites
in the Muslim world, to deliver moral and efficient government and cultural
guidance, indicates that the solution must be religious. Religious
aberrations do not discredit the principle they aberrantly affirm.

What manner
of Islam may most safely undertake this task? It is no accident that the
overwhelming majority of Western Muslim thinkers, including Lindbom himself,
have been drawn into the religion by the appeal of Sufism. To us, the
ideological redefinitions of Islam are hardly more impressive than they
are to the many European xenophobes who take them as normative. We need
a form of religion that elegantly and persuasively squares the circle,
rather than insisting on a conflictual model that is unlikely to damage
the West as much as Islam. A purely non-spiritual reading of Islam, lacking
the vertical dimension, tends to produce only liberals or zealots; and
both have proved irrelevant to our needs.

*
* *

The most
recurrent theme of Islamic architecture has been the dome surmounting
the cube. Between the two there are complex arrangements of arabesques
and pendentives. Religion is worth having because, drawing on the infinite
and miraculous power of God, it can turn a circle into a square in a way
that delights the eye. Through logic and definition the theologian seeks
to show how the infinite engages with the finite. Imam al-Ghazali, and
our tradition generally, came to the conclusion that the Sufi does the
job more elegantly, while not putting the theologian out of a job. But
Sufism also, as Iqbal and the consensus of Muslim theologians in the West
have seen, demonstrates other virtues. Because it has been the instrument
whereby Islam has been embedded in the divergent cultures of the rainbow
that is the traditional Islamic world, we may suppose that it represents
the best instrument available for attempting a ‘dissenting’ Muslim embedding
within today’s inexorable global reality. It insists on the acquisition
of compassion and wisdom as a precondition for the exercise of ijtihad,
or of any other mode of knowing. Its emphasis on the potential grandeur
of man’s condition, of the one who was ‘taught all the Names’, makes it
more humane than any secular humanism. In short, its recognition of the
limitations of rational attempts to square the circle of speaking of the
metaphysical and in justifying virtue, can bring us to real, rather than
illusory, enlightenment, to a true ishraq. This is because there
is only one ‘Light of the heavens and the earth.’ (24:35) Seeking truth
in the many, while ignoring the One, is the cardinal, Luciferian error.
Its consequences for recent human history have already been tragic. Its
prospects, as it yields more and more methods of destruction, and fewer
and fewer arguments for a universal morality, are surely unnerving. Genetic
engineering now threatens to redefine our very humanity, precisely that
principle which the Enlightenment found to be the basis of truth. In such
a world, religion, for all its failings, is likely to be the only force
which can genuinely reconnect us with our humanity, and with our fellow
men.

Wa’Llahu’l-Musta‘an.

NOTES

1. Bukhari,
Tayammum, 1.

2. The view
is expounded most forcefully in his recent Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions
among the Converted Peoples (London, 1998). For a refutation see T.J.
Winter, ‘Some thoughts on the formation of British Muslim identity’, Encounters
8:1 (2002), 3-26.

3. Persian
Psalms (Zabur-i ‘Ajam), translated into English verse from the Persian
of the late Sir Muhammad Iqbal by Arthur J. Arberry. (Lahore, 1948),
8.

4.
The defining demand of the Reformation was the return to the most literal
meaning of Scripture. Hence Calvin: ‘Let us know, then, that the true
meaning of Scripture is the natural and simple one, and let us embrace
and hold it resolutely. Let us not merely neglect as doubtful, but boldly
set aside as deadly corruptions, those pretended expositions which lead
us away from the literal sense.’ (John Calvin, The Epistles of Paul
to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians (Edinburgh,
1965), 84-5. Is this what the West is demanding of us? That a Muslim state
should, in consequence, be a ‘city of glass’, like Calvin’s terrified
Geneva?

13.
The implications of the collapse of Enlightenment reason for theology
have been sketched out by George Lindbeck in his The Nature of Doctrine:
religion and theology in a postliberal age (London, 1984), and (for
a more Islamic turn, because explicitly resistant to those Renaissance-Aristotelian
confidences of Suarez which took Thomism so far from kalam) in
the several works of Jean-Luc Marion. The Ash‘arite resonances are clear
enough: discourse is self-referential unless penetrated by the Word.

18.
This has been discussed with particular clarity by Michel Foucault, L’Hermeneutique
du sujet: Cours au College de France (1981-2) (Paris, 2001), pp.16-17.
Foucault’s pessimism might be further reinforced by considering the corrosive
implications of the new biology, with its anti-egalitarian potential,
for secular reasons for conviviality and mutual respect. Cf. W.D. Hamilton,
Narrow Roads of Gene Land, vol. II (Oxford, 2001), for whom evolutionary
theories ‘have the unfortunate property of being solvents of a vital societal
glue.’